“Missing Richard Simmons” and the Queasiness of Deep-Dive Entertainment Journalism

Richard Simmons’s seeming disappearance, in 2014, serves as the basis for a hugely popular but simultaneously unsettling new podcast.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY

In an early episode of the hit podcast “Missing Richard Simmons,” which aired its sixth and final episode yesterday, the host, Dan Taberski, tells us about the exercise class at Slimmons, Simmons’s Beverly Hills studio. Simmons had led this class for some forty years, from before he got famous and continuing long after he became a multimillionaire. Taberski tells us that Slimmons had a few rules: one, know your place; two, no cell phones, no cameras, no recording devices; three, Richard is going to get freaky. “Richard’s class is a little bit performance art and a lot of bit burlesque,” Taberski says. He’d get flirty, even flash people. And four: Richard will bare his soul. Simmons had cried in every class Taberski attended, telling inspirational stories and sharing his own struggles. Once, when Taberski brought his friend Lauren Weedman to Slimmons, she freaked out. Weedman says that Simmons was hilarious—“until he started crying. Now it’s gone into a zone of, ‘What’s happening?’ ” It was out-of-control crying, she says: “At the time, I remember thinking it was scary.” And it seemed that the students were there not to help but to watch. She compared the idea of going back to Slimmons to going to the bar “where Amy Winehouse drinks herself to death.”

For more than forty years, Simmons built a career on extreme empathy and charm, delivered with sunniness, caring, vulnerability, tears, and camp. He made personal connections with a great many people—healthy, suffering, and in between. He talked about the link between loving yourself, eating right, and moving your body—often sharing painful memories of having been obese as a youth and hating himself because of it. He nearly died at that time, he said, after losing a huge amount of weight in two months, via water and lettuce. Simmons was almost pathologically connected to his fans, indulging celebrity-house-tour passengers by the dozen, meeting people across the United States who needed weight-loss coaching and calling them every week, going on themed exercise cruises where rabid devotees fought for his attention. Apart from such interactions and his relationships with Slimmons regulars, he was, by his own description, a “recluse.”

In 2014, Simmons disappeared abruptly, without explanation. He abandoned Slimmons, retreated into his Tara-like mansion, and cut off contact with many of his friends and staff—as well as with hundreds of people who had come to rely on him for weight-loss-related friendship and emotional support. Most of those people were confused and upset, worrying about his welfare, wondering about his motives. It’s a very strange thing to do, after all—like dying without dying. Taberski, a former producer at “The Daily Show,” decided to investigate, on a podcast.

The “Missing Richard Simmons” phenomenon has been a bit like a national Slimmons class. Suddenly, we were charged up, unnerved, and watching things get freaky. Much has been written and said about its ethics. Amanda Hess, in a Times piece, called the podcast “morally suspect,” and wrote that Taberski spends much of the podcast “trying to justify his invasions.” Taberski, to my ear, seems genuinely caring and well-intentioned, not like an outright creep. But he is invasive, and he does a fair amount of cringeworthy stuff, like comparing the time that Simmons called in to the “Today” show, rather than appearing on video, to a movie in which a kidnapper is holding a gun to his victim’s head.

In the first few episodes, which are wonderfully developed and structured, Taberski reveals the complexity and humanity of this complicated man and the people who love him, and presents information that seems to raise serious questions about Simmons’s emotional and mental stability. But Taberski, though concerned for Simmons’s well-being, seems just as concerned, if not more so, about the question of what Simmons owes to people—explanations, goodbyes. (To me, that’s a bit like going to Slimmons week after week, watching Simmons weep and flash people under a disco ball, and considering it part of one’s own healthy exercise routine.) Taberski considers fascinating and far-ranging theories about Simmons’s disappearance, many of them none of our business, and he gives considerable airtime to dark speculations about Simmons’s longtime housekeeper and companion, Teresa Reveles—that she might be holding him hostage, for example. He devotes a fair amount of space to a friend of Simmons’s saying that Reveles is a witch—a real witch, with spells—who’s controlling his life. At one point, Taberski juxtaposes a segment about Reveles with a clip of Simmons belting out “Cruella de Vil.”

What saves “Missing Richard Simmons,” if just, is the fact that Simmons is a public figure. He has also made a startling and unnerving life move, by disappearing from the lives of the legions of people who loved him and believed themselves to be close to him, with no explanation. We hear about the time Simmons bought a hundred-thousand-dollar ring for Barbra Streisand, whom he’d never met—he wanted to make a grand gesture of love. She sent it back. Taberski says that this podcast is such a gesture—a message to Simmons from the people who love him, who didn’t get to say goodbye. But Simmons didn’t accept it as such. In the final episode, Simmons’s manager tells Taberski that it caused “more worry and speculation.” “I can’t say that Richard feels better as a result of the podcast,” he says. If this is a ring, Simmons sent it back.

Recently, a friend told me about another armchair-detective podcast he’s listened to—a shambling one, he said, possibly a bit grotesque, that seemed to be dragging itself out, collecting fancy sponsors long after it had worn out its theories and its welcome. “Missing Richard Simmons” was not that. To Taberski’s credit, he planned for six episodes, and kept that promise, even after it hit No. 1 on iTunes and people started comparing it to “Serial.” More important, in the end, both podcast and subject seem to have moved closer to sanity. (You can’t help suspecting that the backlash helped inspire Taberski to reel it in a bit.) In the end, Simmons, on some level, appears to be fine. Taberski has conversations with a cop who checked on him, with Simmons’s manager, and with others, and hears again and again that Simmons is healthy and O.K.

“Missing Richard Simmons,” like “Serial” and the documentary “Making a Murderer,” has raised serious questions about the ethics of deep-dive entertainment journalism that investigates current real-life mysteries. When millions of people tune in to shows that expose the minutiae of real lives of real people in something like real time, the subjects’ day-to-day lives can change dramatically, and forever, through no intention of their own. “Simmons” caught a bit of heat, but the genre is burgeoning, and will continue to. Next week, the podcast “S-Town,” from the team behind “Serial” and “This American Life,” will début. That show takes a magnifying glass to an Alabama town and the people who live in it—none of them public figures—and a complicated mess of mysteries and tragedies within. I’ve heard a few episodes, and they shocked me a bit. “Missing Richard Simmons” was just a warm-up: we’ll be having these conversations in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Like “Serial,” “Missing Richard Simmons” revealed that no matter how many details we examine and consider, mysteries aren’t always solvable to self-appointed detectives, or to anybody else. Taberski, quite reasonably, suggests that Simmons went through something rough in early 2014, withdrew from society, got over what was bothering him, and, having tasted freedom, realized that he liked it. Taberski wishes Simmons well, says goodbye, and lets him be. (He also says, rather dutifully, that Teresa Reveles seems like a decent person who does a good job—no song clips to go with that revelation.) Simmons’s manager, without sounding as if he means to be cruel, tells Taberski that perhaps all these people who thought they were Simmons’s friends didn’t mean as much to him as they thought. Maybe his thousands of close personal friends weren’t really his friends at all. The lines between Simmons the person, the weight-loss guru, the hero, and the persona got horribly blurred, Taberski suggests, and perhaps stopping the whole thing was the only way that he could get out. You’re left contemplating the rather bitter idea that empathy can be corrosive. The way Simmons left the life he’d built so strenuously for forty-odd years was harsh, even disturbing—shedding an abundance of tricky relationships all at once, like losing a hundred pounds via water and lettuce. But now, perhaps, having shed them, he’s found a healthier way forward.

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears weekly on newyor­ker.com.